Not necessarily. At my company, all our early dev hires are awesome people we think will be capable of starting a company one day, but aren't yet. Our goal is to teach them what they need to know so that in a few years they can do that handily.
Some of the things we plan to help them learn: corporate equity, pitching VCs, negotiating investments, dealing with investors, handling PR, user testing, user context research, product management, UI design, A/B testing, running production systems at scale, software processes, and engineering management.
We definitely can't offer them more money than Microsoft or Google can, but we sure can teach them a lot more.
Thanks. I figure it will motivate us to keep the work interesting enough that they won't flee. Which in turn will force us to build a much more robust company. We'll see, though.
What are you doing to ensure that employees receive that broad an experience? In the startups I've worked for, the founders were loathe to involve employees in business development, let alone financing.
Depends on the person and their interests, really. A lot of the day-to-day stuff (product prioritization, feature design, user testing, operations, development process) is easy to get people involved in if they want. We definitely involve everybody with recruiting and hiring, which I think is vital for startups.
Direct involvement in financing is, as you expected, hard. But we try to be very open. Everybody knows the burn rate and the terms we took money under. Everybody regularly gets updated on dealings with our investors. We also have a regular brown bag series. A couple months back, my co-founder did one on venture financing, covering both the basics and our specific fundraising effort. He did another one recently on the competitive landscape. And he's an awfully good presenter; you can see a 5-minute talk he did recently on our approach to testing product ideas:
Some of the things we plan to help them learn: corporate equity, pitching VCs, negotiating investments, dealing with investors, handling PR, user testing, user context research, product management, UI design, A/B testing, running production systems at scale, software processes, and engineering management.
We definitely can't offer them more money than Microsoft or Google can, but we sure can teach them a lot more.